Less a tragedy and more a tortured comedy played out in the squelching mud and dirt of Elsinore, Thomas Ostermeier's Schaubuhne production shines the same forensic light on Shakespeare as he previously brought to bear on Kane and Ibsen. The result is brash and noisy, sometimes infuriating, frequently illuminating, occasionally heart-stopping and never, not even for the tiniest moment, dull. You can't always say that about Shakespeare in this country.

Marius von Mayenburg's version begins with "To be or not to be", which becomes an echo over the 165 minutes played without an interval, as Ostermeier offers an Elsinore on the slide. Even the gravedigger can't get the old king's coffin in the ground without slipping on the mud into the grave himself. But it's the hole that Lars Eidinger's Hamlet digs for himself that proves the most dangerous in a country already madly out of control and wedded to excess: there's too much food, too much drink, too many guns too easily fired. Even too much sex: glimpsed through the lens of Hamlet's video camera, Gertrude (Judith Rosmair, fab) looks like a Fellini film star; in the flesh she is something more tawdry. Later, there's an extraordinary moment straight out of The Exorcist.

It's not surprising that this royal family has spawned a dysfunctional country and a dysfunctional prince. This Hamlet is no brooding intellectual or dashing "sweet prince". He's an irritating spoilt kid in a flabby, grown man's body. He plonks his crown on upside-down, he throws tantrums, he lies face down in the mud, he wanders around sticking his video camera in people's faces. Particularly his own. The more he stares into the camera, the more he disappears. The more he feigns madness, the madder he becomes. The only people he seems to trust are us, the audience, and even then he can be rather abusive. Eidinger's Hamlet is not a pretty sight, and you can't take your eyes off of him. Mad, certainly; magnificent and doomed, too.